But it was also a true analogue artefact, and therefore of immense historical value. A recording stored in the volatile memory array of a computer system could be erased or doctored in an eyeblink, and the evidence trail artfully concealed. A recording like the shellac disc could be destroyed, but it could not easily be altered. Forgery was equally difficult, due to the complex chemical make-up of the disc and its packaging. When such items survived to the present day, therefore, they were regarded as extremely reliable windows on the historical past, pre-Nanocaust, pre-Forgetting.
Auger examined the label, reading that the disc contained music by the composer Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Auger knew very little about composers in general, and even less about Mahler in particular. All that she remembered was that he had died well before the beginning of her period of interest.
Caliskan stopped playing and returned the viola and bow to their stand. He watched her studying the disc and asked, “Intrigued?”
Auger put the delicate black disc back in its sleeve, and returned the sleeve to the table. “Is that what you were playing?”
“No. That was a little Bach. The Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, for what it’s worth. Unlike the Mahler, neither the score nor the original recording were ever lost.”
“This is an original recording,” Auger said, fingering the record sleeve. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, but until very recently none were known to have survived. Now that we have that recording, someone somewhere is trying to reverse engineer Mahler’s original score. A hopeless enterprise, of course. We’ve more chance of unearthing an intact one.”
She still had that prickly sense of being tested or led into a trap. “Wait. I’m missing something. You’re telling me that this piece of music was completely lost?”
“Yes.”
“And now you’ve found an intact recording?”
“Exactly so. It’s a cause for great celebration. The record you just examined was recovered from Paris only a matter of weeks ago.”
“I don’t see how that can be,” Auger said, careful not to accuse him outright of lying. “Nothing bigger than a pinhead comes out of Paris without my knowing about it. I’d definitely have heard if something as significant as that had been unearthed. In fact, I’d probably be the one who found it.”
“This is something you missed. Shall I tell you something else very interesting?”
“Oh, why not.”
“This is the original, not a copy. This is the actual artefact, exactly as it was recovered. No restorative work has taken place.”
“That’s also highly unlikely. The disc might have survived three or four hundred years with relatively little damage, but not the packaging.”
Caliskan had returned to his monstrously large desk. Sitting behind it, he looked like a little boy visiting his father’s office. He steepled his fingers, peering over them owlishly. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Paper doesn’t last, especially not the wood-pulp paper they were using in that era. Ironically, the cotton-pulp paper from much earlier lasts a lot better. Not as easy to bleach, but the alum they used in the wood-pulp process undergoes hydrolysis and produces sulphuric acid.”
“Not good.”
“That’s not all. There are metal tannins in the inks that also lead to deterioration. Not to mention airborne contaminants. Then the glues dry up. The labels come off and the sleeve begins to come apart at the seams. The dyes fade. Lacquer on the card turns brown and cracks off.” Auger picked up the sleeve and examined it again, certain she must have missed something. “With the right methods, you can correct a lot of that damage. But the resultant artefacts are still incredibly fragile—far too valuable to be handled like this. And this one definitely hasn’t been restored.”
“As I just told you.”
“All right. Then it must have spent three-hundred-odd years in a vacuum chamber, or some other preserving agent. Someone must have taken deliberate steps to keep it intact.”
“No special measures were taken,” Caliskan insisted. “As I said, it’s exactly as we found it. Here’s another question: if you suspected the recording was a fake, how would you prove it?”
“A recent fake?” Auger shrugged. “There are a lot of things I could try. Chemical analysis of the shellac, for one thing, but of course I wouldn’t want to touch it until we’d laser-scanned the grooves and got the whole thing on magnetic tape.”
“Very sound methodology. What else?”
“I’d run a radiocarbon analysis on the cellulose fibres in the paper.”
Caliskan rubbed his nose speculatively. “Tricky, for an object suspected to be only three or four hundred years old.”
“But doable. We’ve made some refinements in the calibration curves lately. And I wouldn’t be trying to date it exactly, just establish that it wasn’t recent.”
“And your anticipated conclusions?”
“I try not to anticipate conclusions, but I’d put good money on that artefact being a clever hoax, no matter how watertight its provenance.”
“Well, you’d be right,” Caliskan said. “If you ran the usual tests, you’d conclude that the artefact must have been manufactured very recently.”
Auger felt a curious sense of deflation, as if she had been excited about something without quite realising it. “Is there a point to this, sir?”
“The point is, it still sounds like Mahler to me.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Auger said.
“Do you miss music?”
“You can’t miss what you’ve never known, sir.”
“You’ve never known rain, either. Not real rain, falling from a real sky.”
“That’s different,” she said, needled that he knew so much about her. “Sir, do you mind if I ask what this is all about? What are you doing here, so far from Antiquities? What business do you have dragging me halfway across Tanglewood?”
“Careful, Verity.”
“I have a right to know.”
“You have no right to know anything. However, since I’m feeling generous… I take it you were told about the Contingencies Board?”
“Yes. I also know there’s no such thing.”
“There is,” Caliskan said. “And I should know—I happen to run it.”
“No, sir,” she said. “You run Antiquities.”
“That, too. But my sideways promotion into Antiquities was only ever a matter of expediency. Two years ago, something dropped into our laps. A find…” He paused before correcting himself. “Two finds, if you like—both of staggering strategic value. A pair of linked discoveries that have the potential to change our entire relationship with the Polities. Discoveries that could, in fact, alter our entire relationship with reality.”
“I don’t like Slashers,” Auger said. “Especially after what happened in Paris.”
“Don’t you think we should let bygones be bygones?”
“Easy for you to say, sir. You weren’t touched by Amusica. You didn’t have that taken from you.”
“No,” Caliskan said. “The Amusica virus didn’t touch me, just as it didn’t touch one person in a thousand. But I lost something rather dearer to me than the mere perception of music.”
“If you say so.”
“I lost a brother to Slashers,” he said, “in the final stages of the Phobos offensive, when we were trying to retake the Moon. If anyone has a right to hate them, I do.”
She didn’t know that Caliskan had even had a brother, let alone that he had died in the last war. “Do you hate them, sir?”